> > I tryed to do a full backup of my hard drive lastnight.  I executed
> > "tar cv" and I watched the list of files as they were backed up.  I
> > noticed that /kern/root/ is ?? to /.  Its not a soft link.  I don't
> > know what it is but it causes tar to do is recurse indefinatley. ie
> > /kern/root/kern/root ...  I tryed rm -fr root from /kern.  It didn't do
> > anything.
> 
> I was hit by this on my first try too.
> 
> The solution is simple, you may either "umount /kern" (the backup-value
> of this would be questionable anyway), or - which is what I prefer -
> use either the "--force-local" option of tar to prevent it to enter other
> file systems (which is not what you want if you have more than one) or
> "--exclude" to leave out a specified file or directory. If you do the later,
> watch out for the "--absolute-paths" (or -P) option.

Or better yet, do backups the way they're intended to be done, namely with
"dump" or "rdump", then you also avoid this problem.

- Havard

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